The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) defines police “response time” as the time it takes for the police to respond to a call for service, from when the call is answered to arrival on the scene. Before the pandemic, San Francisco was known for its fast response times - “almost twice as fast as cities like San Jose and Fort Worth”. That was then. This is now:
“It took longer for police to respond in 2022, even as the number of calls to police dropped by 38% since 2019. Calls to 911 also sank by 22% in the same period… SFPD chief financial officer Patrick Leung blamed lengthening response times to what he and other city leaders say is an agency-wide staffing crisis... The Police Commission report showed that the number of full duty staffers dropped to 1,537 by the end of 2022, down from 1,872 in 2017. SFPD estimates they need roughly 2,182 staffers to operate efficiently.” - As San Franciscans Make Fewer 911 Calls, SFPD Takes Longer To Respond, by Liz Lindqwister/The San Francisco Standard. March 1, 2023
So how bad have police response times gotten in San Francisco? This chart tells the story:
These are median-minutes response times for each month. Priority A calls are the most serious, as when death, serious injury or major property damage are present or imminent. Examples include live gun shots, fight with weapons and in-progress burglary. Priority B calls involve situations with potential for damage to property, the suspect may be in the area; or the crime has just occurred. Examples include burglary, perpetrator no longer on-scene and verbal fight. Priority C calls are those in which there is no present or potential danger to life or property; the suspect is no longer in the area; or the crime scene is protected. Examples include loitering, parking violation, and noise complaint.
As a general rule, faster response times lead to higher crime clearance rates - that is, the rate of crimes “solved for reporting purposes”, usually by arrest. Given the recent rise in SFPD response times, one would expect that San Francisco’s clearance rates would be down over roughly the same period. And that is what I found:
But as we all know, correlation does not prove causation. In the case of San Francisco, SFPD staffing shortages may be responsible for both for the rise in response times and the fall in clearance rates. That’s because fewer cops on patrol duty translates to longer response times. And fewer cops to investigate crimes means lower clearance rates.
However, there is evidence that longer police response times do lead to an undercount of crimes. As Jeff Asher of Jeff-alytics explains:
“Longer police response times lead to a series of other issues. To begin with, longer response times reduce the likelihood that an incident will be successfully reported to police which in turn leads to crimes being undercounted…In San Francisco, 18 percent of Calls for Service with a response time under 5 minutes in 2022 had a disposition of “Gone on Arrival” or “Unable to Locate” compared to 57 percent of incidents with a response time of 3 hours or more.”
And an undercount of crimes in San Francisco may explain, at least in part, the mismatch between residents’ perceptions of public safety and the official violent crime rate. Another reason for that mismatch is that San Francisco’s violent crime figures exclude crimes and situations that are rightly considered threatening, such as simple assault.
Simple assault includes behaviors such as throwing a rock at someone, swinging but missing, making a violent threat, raising a fist and walking towards a person, or pushing someone intentionally. A reasonable person does not feel safe when the object or witness of such behavior. Nor would a reasonable person feel safe being near someone who looks like they may explode in violence at any minute, whether due to drug-induced rage or psychosis. These behaviors are not unusual in San Francisco. And yet when surveys reveal that residents feel unsafe in the city, the local pundits opine about the gulf between perception and reality, as if official figures on violent crime capture the reality of what it’s actually like to negotiate those streets (especially if you’re short or old).
While the SFPD doesn’t publish data on simple assaults, the Bureau of Justice Statistics does include simple assault data in its annual crime victimization reports. Per the 2021 report, the national victimization rate for simple assaults was about four times that of aggravated assault (10.9 versus 2.7 per 1000 persons). It’s important to note, however, that “victimization” is not the same as “victim”, as a single person can be victimized more than once in the same year. But what that means is that the number of simple assault victims in the BOJ report would be smaller than the number of victimizations - most likely, less than 1% of the respondents.
For comparison, in a survey conducted last year in San Francisco, close to a quarter of respondents reported they had been threatened or physically attacked in the past five years. That’s a lot of people.